FIVE UFOs OVER GULF COAST

On Wednesday, February 5, 1997, at 11:30 p.m.,
motorists driving north on Texas Highway 36 from
Brazoria (population 3,025) spotted a formation of
five circular red lights in the sky.

One of the motorists was the husband of Nancy
Marcum, South Texas regional director of Skywatch,
International. Mrs. Marcum has provided a detailed
summary of her husband's sighting.

"He said from this distance they looked about
tree (top) level as he was coming closer to West
Columbia (population 4,109)." The UFOs passed
directly over the Marcum vehicle, and he estimated
"that they were about a thousand feet up. I told him
I didn't know how high a thousand would be, so he said
about three radio towers high."

Mrs. Marcum provided a schematic of the UFO
formation. This is what it looked like.

0 0
0
0 0

"If you were to number each 0 as a (red) light, the
one to the far right, he said, was the tail end of the
formation. The red lights all came on (blinking) in
random order--no two would be on at the same time.
Say, the flashes were a second apart."

Mr. Marcum reported that, heading north out
of Brazoria, the formation approached from "the left
hand side of the road" (the west) "over to the right
hand side of the road" (the east) and on (southward)
to Bailey's Prairie or Angelton or maybe the Lake
Jackson area. He said the lights were all at the same
level, and they were spread apart more than a
football-field length would be."

"I asked him if he could make out the shape of
the objects," Mrs. Marcum said, "and he said all he
could see were the lights. At one point, he described
them (the lights) as coming out of a cone-shaped area.
He was all wound up because he thinks this UFO stuff
is a bunch of hooey. But now he's wondering just what
it was he saw. The guy in the car behind him ran off
the road. He doesn't know if it was because he slowed
down to stare at the objects, or if the guy beside him
also saw the objects." (Many thanks to Nancy Marcum
for this story.)

MYSTERY BOOM IN OREGON

On Tuesday, February 4, 1997, at 6:15 p.m., a
mysterious "skyquake" or booming sound rocked
homes and farms in southern Oregon. The sound
was also heard as far north as Port Townsend,
Washington, on Puget Sound.

At 6:15 p.m., observers in Cave Junction, Oregon
(population 600) spotted "a bright object or meteor"
shooting across the sky. The object first appeared
south of Pearsoll Peak (elevation 5091 feet) and flew
in a northeasterly direction, across the Illinois River
toward Kerby Butte (elevation 5555 feet).

The boom and resulting shock wave then rattled
homes in Cave Junction, Kerby, Selma and the city
of Grants Pass (population 15,000). The Josephine
County Sheriff's Department received hundreds of
phone calls from area residents immediately after
the "explosion." The sheriff's dispatcher phoned the
Federal Aviation Administration office in Portland and
was reportedly told that the Oregon Air National Guard
had "a high-performance aircraft" operating in the area.

Witness John E. Mingo reported, "The sonic boom
was before 7 p.m. I have heard sonic booms before
but this one rocked everything. The boom shook
windows from one end of the city (Grants Pass) to the
other. Local radio reported that it was a routine
military flight up the coast. They say the boom was
felt from southern Oregon all the way to Seattle." That
is, a distance of about 500 miles (800 kilometers).

Another witness, who asked to remain anonymous,
said he heard "two aircraft go supersonic" right after
"the object" passed over Josephine County. "The
direction of these aircraft is unknown because they
were not showing their running lights. I know the sound
of supersonic flight from previous military experience."

Mark S. of Whidbey Island, Washington disputed
the news reports that the boom was caused by an
SR-71 reconnaissance plane, pointing out that only
three are still in service and none are known to be in
the Pacific Northwest. Mark said he believes the
"supersonics" to be F/A-18 interceptors from
Bremerton, Washington. (Unsolicited Email)

(Editor's Note: Grants Pass and adjacent Josephine
County towns were the site of a still-unexplained UFO
flap on May 27, 1949. It's listed as Case #404 in
Project Blue Book.)

UFOs SEEN IN WEST INDIES

On Thursday night, January 30, 1997, at
10:33 p.m., Joseph Michaels was walking a beach
on the north shore of Antigua, an island in the West
Indies, when he suddenly spotted "a strange streak"
in the sky.

"Object came from the northeast as a short
streak of white light," Michaels reported. "I thought
it was a shooting star. About five to ten seconds
later, it entered a very good, very controlled
stationary flash which lasted about 0.25 ms
(milliseconds) per flash."

Michaels counted six distinct flashes "in
random order and with a definite break in between
each one." While looking up, expecting to see
number seven, instead he saw a second "streak"
flying in a west-southwesterly direction. The
second UFO was also flashing "at 0.25 ms, and
traveling at that speed produced a streak (or
contrail) 10 to 12 miles long." He estimated
that the flashing objects were at "flight level 600,"
i.e. 60,000 feet (18,182 meters). (Many thanks to
the Lost Tribe for this story.)

(Editor's Comment: Just to satisfy my curiosity,
I plotted the flight paths of both the West Columbia
and the Antigua UFOs on a map of the Caribbean.
The two lines intersected at about latitude 13 North,
longitude 81 West, or an island called Isla da
Providencia, owned by Colombia. Let's wait and
see if there are any more sightings from that area.)

BRAZIL'S UFO CROP CIRCLES

Brazilian ufologists are investigating two crop
circles that appeared in 1996, according to the
magazine Revista UFO for November 1996.

The first one appeared the night of April 17,
1996, behind a small church in Bairro Guama
near Belem. Eyewitnesses told the Policia
Civil that they saw a strange light behind the
church at first. Then, as they entered the
churchyard, "um estranho objeto sobrevoando
o ceu da cidade" (a strange object flew over
them into the city sky.) According to an
eyewitness, Alfredo de Oliveira Montes, 27,
of Bairro Guama, the UFO left behind a
scorched circle measuring 10 meters
(33 feet) in diameter.

Two months later, on June 16, 1996,
Senhor Francischini, supervisor of the
Fazenda (farm) Areia Branca, located in
Ipigua, near the city of Sao Jose do Rio Preto
in Sao Paulo state, while planting oranges
spotted a bright yellow light above the
grove. Upon investigation, Francischini and
his farmworkers discovered a crop circle
measuring 10 meters (33 feet). The case
is now being investigated by CEPEX.

USAF: TELSTAR STILL IN ORBIT

A spokeswoman for the North American
Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in
Colorado denies that satellite Telstar 401 has
been removed from its geostationary orbit over
the 97th meridian west.

In an interview with Mike Lindemann,
editor of CNI News, on Monday, February 3,
1997, Frankie Webster, assistant to NORAD
public information officer Major Steve Boylan,
said the Combat Operations Center was still
tracking the crippled satellite on radar.

Telstar 401 lost all power on January 11,
several hours after a "solar tsunami'" struck the
Earth. A report circulating last week claimed
that the communications satellite had been
"approached by a mysterious object" and had
then "vanished."

Ms. Webster reportedly said that no object
had been detected near Telstar 401 by NORAD
radar. She also told Mike Lindemann that there
was no officer named "Major General John Yancy,
USAF" at NORAD.

The "missing Telstar 401" email reportedly
originated with Stanton T. Friedman, one of the
country's most highly respected ufologists and
author of CRASH at CORONA and OPERATION
MAJIC. However, on Thursday, February 6, Mr.
Friedman denied sending the message, claiming,
"I did not send a fax about Tel Star to Art Bell."

It appears that the Telstar 401 story was a
deliberate hoax by persons unknown.

(Editor's Comment: Put Telstar on the shelf with
the Huntsville, Alabama landing and the three
non-existent UFOs of Medford, Oregon as
classic Internet hoaxes.)

SOHO PHOTO SHOWS ANOMALOUS
OBJECT ABOVE THE SUN

The Solar and Heliostropic Observatory (SOHO),
a satellite jointly operated by NASA and the
European Space Agency photographed the recent
solar tsunami, which erupted from the sun on
January 6, 1997.

SOHO is parked in orbit one million kilometers
(600,000 miles) in front of the Earth and positioned
so that it always has the sun under observation.
On January 7, SOHO photographed the giant,
magnetically-charged cloud as it raced across space
at one million miles per hour. On January 10, the
cloud struck Earth's magnetic field, delivering a
charge of one million amps.

According to the February 1, 1997 issue of
Science News, page 68, "SAMPEX, a satellite 600
kilometers above the Earth, recorded a boost in the
intensity of fast electrons--those with energies
greater than one million electron-volts--to raise them
10,000 times the typed value in the (Van Allen)
radiation belt...The intensity of high-energy electrons
near Earth climbed higher yet, and the total amount
of energy dissipated in auroras over the North and
South Poles reached 1,400 gigawatts, nearly double
the electric power generated in the United States."

The SOHO photo shows the solar tsunami as
"a white ring" at the bottom of the image. However,
the photo also shows a very bright object, lozenge-
shaped and much brighter than the stars, directly
above the sun at a twelve o'clock position.

The photo was published in the February 3, 1997
issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology
on page 68.

Also, Halley Bay research station in Antarctica
lost radio contact with incoming aircraft on January
10 and January 11 as a result of the magnetic storm.

ROUNDUP CORRIGENDA

Or, cleaning up some
goofs in recent issues. Derrel Sims is a Texas
hypnotherapist and not "an Israeli ufologist," as
reported. Also, Jennifer Jarvis is the Southern
Ontario Working Group Coordinator for CSETI
and is not a "member of MUFON Ontario."

ISRAELI ALIEN "JUST A LIZARD"

On December 21, 1996, Mrs. Zyona Damti, 34,
of Achihod, Israel discovered the remains of a
creature 30 centimeters long on her kibbutz dairy
farm. Most of the remains were sent to Technion
University in Haifa for analysis, which labeled the
material "cow manure" and promptly threw it out.

However, Israeli ufologists Debby Segal and
Uriya Shai, representing the Damti family, retained a
small sample of the "alien." On January 15, they
turned their sample over to the British UFO Research
Association (BUFORA), which made arrangements
to have the material tested at a lab in Manchester,
England.

On January 29, lab director Keith Hall announced
the results of the analysis. The team used mass
spectrometers to determine the carbon and nitrogen
"signatures" of the material. The signatures, Hall said,
"were well within terrestrial limits" and "very close to
those expected from lizards and frogs."

BUFORA has expressed satisfaction with the test
results and has identified the Achichod "alien" as
most likely an embryonic lizard.

(Editor's Comment: A question still unanswered is
why the Technion Institute, whose scientists are
presumably as competent in the use of mass
spectrometers as Mr. Hall's team, identified the
bulk remains of the lizard as "cow manure?")

FUN UFO WEBSITES:

Patrick Weatherford provides complete coverage
of the UFO situation in Arkansas at his site, located
at http://www.angelfire.com/ar/TheArkansasSky.

Mrs. John Alexander's UFO Religious Survey can
be found at http://www.accessnv.com/NIDS

The Ummites have their own page, too. Log in at
http://www.efrei.fr/~loporto/articles/UMMO_FR.HTML

And, for past issues of UFO ROUNDUP, drop in
at http://ufoinfo.com/roundup/index.shtml

That's it for this week. To our readers in China,
Taiwan and Singapore...Happy New Year! May the
Year of the Ox Bring Blessings and Prosperity!
Best wishes from "the paper that goes home...
UFO ROUNDUP."

UFO ROUNDUP: Copyright 1997 by Masinaigan
Productions, all rights reserved. Readers may post
any stories from UFO ROUNDUP on their websites
or in newsgroups provided that they credit the
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